In this work we present the optical design of a solar concentrator for an High-Flux solar furnace of a solar laboratory, these concentrator is compound for an aspheric mirror surface sectioned in 121 hexagonal facets to simplify the construction process, its total diameter is 6.6 m and a focal length is 3.68 m, also was developed the corresponding algorithm to determine the correct position and orientation of each hexagonal section that compound the arrangement. We present the results of the focused energy of this configuration and we propose a modification on the original position of the mirrors for optimizing the focusing of energy by the sun furnace. These modifications produces an increment on the energy focused on a small area in a remarkable way similar to used a parabolic mirror. The algorithm before mentioned was programmed in MathCAD and it calculates the modification of the original position of each hexagonal mirror giving us a file that ZEMAX can read. This file contains the information of each 121 mirrors from the arrangement and also the correct form, position and direction, simplifying the traditional input process one by one.

Date Published: 13 September 2007
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 6652, Optical Modeling and Measurements for Solar Energy Systems, 66520E (13 September 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.734470

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6652:
Optical Modeling and Measurements for Solar Energy Systems
Daryl R. Myers, Editor(s)